Mao Zedong walked a long and dangerous road on his way to leading China for 27 years starting in 1949 to 1976. His first step down that road was to survive the Civil War against the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek, a brutal dictator for life that the United States supported. To escape defeat, Mao avoided combat as much as possible to retreating on an almost impossible march known as Mao’s Long March that’s considered one of the most significant military campaigns in the 20th century, and one of the most amazing physical feats ever attempted.

Surrounded by hostile armies, 87,000 Communist troops escaped and started a retreat that covered nearly 6,000 miles in one year.

Meanwhile in China, Mao launched his Great Leap Forward that failed in the disaster of what’s still know as Mao’s Great Famine that I wrote about in Part 5.

Having failed, Mao stepped aside to let someone else run China. The large communes of the Great Leap Forward were abandoned and the peasants returned to their villages to farm the land,

Fearing the return of capitalism, Mao’s supporters printed a book with his slogans. Mao wanted to break the thinking and attitudes of old China. Through film, a propaganda campaign was launched so Mao could regain power, and in 1966, he launched the insanity of the Cultural Revolution.

Soon after Mao died in 1976, Deng Xiaoping ended the Cultural Revolution, led the revision of the Chinese Constitution to limit leaders to two 5-year terms so China would never have another Mao, a powerful dictator for life, and opened China to world trade, and in the last 40 years, thanks to Deng, China is not only responsible for ninety percent of the reduction in global poverty but also the growth of a U.S. style consumer middle class of about 300 million Chinese.

In fact, the Chinese middle class now leads the world in tourism, and sends more of their children to attend colleges in the United States, Canada, and Europe than any other country. More than 100 million Chinese freely leave China annually to visit, as tourists, other countries around the globe and then fly home.

One blight on China under Deng’s leadership was the alleged crushing of a student democracy movement in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989. The truth is the protests that took place in Tiananmen Square didn’t start as a democracy movement, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) does not deny that there were deaths, but the CCP says the deaths took place several miles from Tiananmen Square due to a bloody confrontation between the People’s Liberation Army and violent protestors throwing Molotov cocktails. What is the truth about Tiananmen Square?

As this 6-part series ends, you might be thinking about what was missing. For instance the Great Wall of China, the Grand Canal, or China’s ancient irrigation system, the Treasure of Sichuan, built more than 2,200 years ago, the oldest and only surviving non-dam irrigation system in the word. The next two posts will be about the Great Wall of China and the Grand Canal. Click the link in this paragraph to discover the Treasure of Sichuan, a UNESCO World Heritage Site admired by scientists from around the world.

The Rape of Nanking offers a brutal snapshot of what happened to China after Japan invaded in 1937.

In addition, David C. Schak reports, “Throughout most of Chinese history the majority of Chinese have lived in poverty. As the hundreds of famines that have killed millions of Chinese attest, Chinese poverty has often been absolute, i.e., lacking the very material resources needed to sustain life and maintain health.”

In 1949, the population of China was 562 million, and the average life expectancy was 36 years. In 1976 when Mao died, the population had reached 930 million and average life expectancy had increased to about 65 years.

But for his 27 years as the leader of China, the West had repeatedly blamed Mao for murdering 60 million of his own people by letting them starve to death during what’s known as Mao’s Great Famine of 1958 – 62. The CCP admits there was a famine but says that only about 3 million died. Henry Kissinger says it was closer to 20 million. Where did all of those estimates come from – 3 million, 20 million, and 60 million? From the same data that the CCP made available for the world.

What was happening in the West in the 1950s and 60s: The Cold War, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee and mass hysteria over the perceived threat posed to Capitalism by Communism. It was known as the era of The Red Scare. There was a war against the spread of Communism in Korea (1950 – 1953) that ended in a stalemate ,and then another war in Vietnam that the U.S. lost, because the government in Vietnam today is a Communist one, the same one the U.S. fought from 1955 to 1975.

Five U.S. Presidents fought the Vietnam War from Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953 – 1961) to Gerald R. Ford (1974 – 1977). In between were Presidents John F. Kennedy (assassinated), Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon (resigned to avoid being impeached).

Few in the West know that America’s leaders refused to lift an embargo on China during what’s known as Mao’s Great Famine, and help feed those starving Chinese once Mao and the CCP discovered what was happening and asked for help from the world.

The only help came from Canada and France, two countries that broke ranks with the United States to help save lives in China.

To end Communism in China, America’s leaders were willing to let millions of Chinese starve to death, and then blame Mao even though China is known as the Land of Famines, because Imperial records for more than 2,000 years recorded that China has had droughts, floods, famines, and loss of life annually up to 1962 when under the leadership of the CCP, the Chinese haven’t suffered from one since, a first in Chinese history; a first most of the global media outside of China has not reported on.

In China’s long history, two times China was conquered and ruled by minorities. The first time was by the Mongols led by Kublai Khan. His Yuan Dynasty was short lived, lasting 89 years from 1279 to 1368 AD. After Kublai Khan’s wife died, he isolated himself from the public and his government fell into corruption. He died alone in his palace at 80, and it didn’t take long for a rebellion to break out and the Ming Dynasty to replace the Mongols.

The Ming Dynasty (1368 – 1683 AD) was established by the White Lotus, a secret Buddhist society. The Ming would be China’s last Han ruled dynasty.

Near the end of the Ming Dynasty in the 16th century, China started its long decline as the wealthiest, most powerful and technologically advanced nation on the planet to be replaced by the rise of the European colonial empires and the United States.

Needham’s research revealed that the ancient Chinese, when Europe was suffering through its Dark Ages (5th to 15th centuries AD), had an average of 15 important innovations a century for a total of more than 1,500. Then came the sixteenth century, when the Renaissances was under way in Europe, and the creative passions of China seemed to dry up and ended in the 19th century with the Opium Wars (1839 – 1860).

Foreign traders, mostly the British (The French and the United States eventually joined the British in this war to force illegal drugs on China), had been illegally exporting (smuggling) opium from India to China since the 18th century. The resulting widespread addiction in China caused serious social and economic disruption leading to the collapse of the last imperial dynasty, the Qing Dynasty (1644 – 1912 AD) led by the Manchu minority.

During the Han Dynasty (BC 206 – 210 AD) in the first century B.C., trade with Central Asia introduced Buddhism to China. Over the centuries, interest in Buddhism grew. However, due to Confucianism and Taoism, the Chinese adapted Buddhist scripture to fit the Chinese culture creating the Mahayana sect, which spread to Korea and Japan.

In 132 AD, the first seismograph was invented, and in 134 AD the device measured its first earthquake that helped to accurately predict the location several hundred miles away.

Feminism is a social movement in the United States and Europe that is still struggling for equal rights for women, but China had a powerful feminist in Emperor Wu Zetian (625 – 705 AD), who was the only female emperor in China’s history.

The Tang Dynasty was a time of relative freedom for women. Women didn’t bind their feet (for a few more centuries) or lead submissive lives. It was a time in which a number of exceptional women contributed in the areas of culture and politics.